CALLISON: OK, can you tell me what the historical role of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is and how did it enter into the field of environmental research?

NEWMARK: Well, that's a good question. The laboratory is a place full of, you know, smart scientists working on problems of, national mission questions... problems pertinent to the nation. And about ten years ago the department of energy... It became clear that many of the Department of Energy facilities were heavily contaminated through the same kind of industrial processes that, that are present elsewhere in the nation.

When you look at the department of energy facilities the problems posed in terms of environmental contamination look just like anywhere else in the industrial complex, with the exception that some of them are also radioactively contaminated. So when the DoE started looking at their problems and and the very slow and cumbersome ways that we had to clean them up, they started addressing the question of "can we speed up the clean up of these sites"? Or for some of the contaminated sites, for which there were no technologies available, could we develop technologies that could address these very serious problems?

And so, we started looking at how we could clean up our own messes, which just so happen to have mirrored those of the nation So historically, we got into the business of environmental technology development to address our own clean up problems.

CALLISON: Can you tell me, I mean, you focused mostly on the environmental research, but can you give me a little bit of background? I mean, what does, like maybe two or three sentences of what Lawrence Livermore has done, up until now. I mean like.....

NEWMARK: OK. Lawrence Livermore National Lab was founded to develop nuclear weapons and it attracted physicists, engineers, people who were not only able to develop nuclear weapons, but to test them and verify their performance. So we have a lot of people who are very good at diagnostics, doing integrated, large experiments. These are just the kind of resources you need to do testing of new technology for the environment, because we are doing the same things in the ground, and using some of these very advanced diagnostic techniques to verify that the clean up technologies are working.

So, pretty much we were developing technologies using the same kind of expertise we had to do an underground nuclear explosion test.

CALLISON: Great.

NEWMARK: In fact, the, the... When we went to test and demonstrate the environmental cleanup technologies we are talking about today, Dynamic Underground Stripping, we had to do a big, integrated test in the sub-surface and the engineer who was our project engineer, is a nuclear weapons engineer. He was used to doing very, ext... complicated, sophisticated, underground tests and verifying their performance. So, we were able to incorporate a lot of the techniques that we had developed previously for this verification.

CALLISON: Can you explain to me what Dynamic Underground Stripping is? And, I mean, you just kinda got into how the technology was developed, but can you tell me what exactly it does?

NEWMARK: The traditional way... OK, let me back up. The worst problems that we were looking at, when we started looking at the DoE's problems, were those of separate phase or separate product contaminants: chemical contaminants have gotten into the groundwater. Particularly the ones that are denser than water, ‘cause they keep going down. They hit the water table, they keep dropping. And they're very low solubility. So one drop of these contaminants can contaminate literally millions of gallons of water.

The traditional way of cleaning them up is you pump the dirty water to the surface and you treat it.

Well, if one drop of this stuff can contaminate millions of gallons of water, you can imagine it takes a long time and you're basically trying to clean a soapy sponge by rinsing it. It takes a lot of water to clean up a dirty site like this.

So we were looking at this type of problem to address, to to figure out how to clean it up better. And I... a good way of looking at Dynamic Underground Stripping is somebody who has a dirty shirt, you know that to clean a dirty shirt, if it's really dirty, use hot water, instead of cold water. When you heat up the clean up, when you heat the soil up and the ground water up, the contaminants are more readily removed, because absorption drops. There are a lot of physical and chemical processes that aid you in removing the contaminant from the sub-surface.

So, Dynamic Underground Stripping is a series of technologies or methods to heat the ground up and remove the contaminants.

And we've borrowed the heating techniques that were developed by the enhanced oil recovery business. They wanna speed up the removal of oil from the sub-surface, so they heat the ground. They use steam-injection and sometimes they use electrical heating. Dynamic Underground Stripping utilizes those kinds of technologies to heat the soil up and remove the contaminants more readily. You end up pumping much less water and much more contaminant out of the ground.

So you can think of a dirty site, and you want to remove this dirty stuff in the center. You would inject steam along the periphery. The steam will preferentially channel and start heating the soil up, meanwhile, you're removing contaminant and water from the center. Eventually, the steam goes all the way from the injection wells to the central extraction wells. The whole soil area is heated, you pull a vacuum. At that point, your residual contaminants flash to the vapor phase. All the water is trying to boil, and you remove tremendous amounts of these organic contaminants.

Now in some, some soils are too impermeable for the steam to penetrate real well. That's where electrical heating comes in. If your site is very low permeability, it might be more economical to heat the soil up using electrical heating. It works just like heating the eye on an electrical stove. The wells themselves are the electrodes, you pass current between them and the soil itself is the path for the current. It heats up just like that. Your electric toaster or the eye of your stove.

Again the object is to heat the soil and pump the contaminant up to the surface.

Now we brought another set of technology to bear on this. When you're doing this very rapid heating, you want to be sure you're doing it safely. You want to know which zones are hot and which zones you've missed. Because if you leave contaminant behind, you haven't cleaned the site up. So we use geo-physical imaging techniques to monitor and control the process. It's like taking a CAT scan in the, in the soil. And it can show you which pieces are hot, which pieces are not, where the contaminant has not yet been re..recovered from.

So these three kinds of technologies, two different heating technologies and the imaging technology are brought together and, under the name Dynamic Underground Stripping.

Now there's another piece of the technology, which you haven't mentioned. We also discovered that many of these organic contaminants will readily break apart; will be destroyed in the presence of water. But it...normal temperatures and pressures, it's very, very slow, which is why nobody's really noticed this before. But when you heat up the water, this process speeds up. It's called Hydris-Pyrolisis Oxidation. It's a water, the water actually helps in the, in the chemical reaction. And at the temperatures that we generate, when we do Dynamic Underground Stripping, we start destroying a lot of the chemicals in place. And they're mineralized to things like Carbon-Dioxide and Chloride ions. They're very benign products. We haven't seen any bad daughter products in the destruction of these different chemicals. We've tested a number of chemicals in the, in the laboratory and so far, we have yet to find one that doesn't mineralize under these circumstances.

So the one, two punch is...You heat the soil up, you do a rapid recovery of as much product as you can. Once the sub-surface is hot, any water in there is starting to destroy additional contaminant. And at Visalia, about 18% of the contaminant is removed or recovered from the site, has been destroyed in place.

CALLISON: That's great.

NEWMARK: I might need to repeat that, because it's kind of jumbled, but the idea... One of the things that's real exciting about this is you can now look at a site and engineer how to clean it up. You can decide to do most of it by removing as much material as possible or you can do it by designing a system to destroy most of it in the ground. Kind of two ends of the engineering spectrum and, depending on the site problems, and the other non-technical issues.

For example, the site owner may have issues with his, with the facilities on the surface. They might not want to pump a lot of fluid out of the ground. They can have a choice and they can engineer something to know how long it's going to take, more or less, how much it's gonna cost and have an endpoint in mind, that's not centuries out in the future, it's just a few years out in the future.

CALLISON: Will this technology have spin-offs. I mean, do you see, I mean, you're talking about having choices and it sounds like you're starting to think longer term. Is this going to end up in the private market? I mean, do you see this as a solution to cleaning up all Superfund sites, or, or even privately contaminated areas?

NEWMARK: These technologies are, constitute new tools in the toolbox. There are a lot of different kinds of sites out there. There are a lot of Superfund sites. We've had studies that have given a percentage of how many of the Superfund sites might be cleaned up by these technologies, just by themselves. But there are, any any one site will probably need........These, these technologies really constitute new tools in the environmental cleanup toolbox. Some of them might be used on, all of them might be used on one kind of site and maybe just steam injection on another site.

In, there have been some studies that have indicated that of the 1,300 Superfund sites right now, one quarter of them are directly addressable by this combination of technologies and parts of another quarter, can be cleaned up using these technologies . The technologies are commercially available now. We have some licensees who provide the service for a fee. So the technologies are now starting to be applied to both private and governmental facilities, which excites us a lot. This is why we do it.

We're not in the business of cleaning up sites, we're in the business of developing new technologies, so that people can make money doing the, you know, providing the service and cleaning up the sites that really need it.

CALLISON: You've kind of already hit this question a couple of ways, but maybe just a pointish answer. Why did Lawrence Livermore feel that Dynamic Underground Stripping was important?

NEWMARK: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the facility here is a Superfund site itself. It has chemical contamination, fairly, fairly common chemical. One of the most common in the United States, is in the ground water. So we, we are a Superfund site and we also had some little hot spots.

So, we were able to develop this technology, keeping in mind our own problem and the main problems of the DoE's facilities. We demonstrated it, initially at one of our hot spots on campus here and cleaned it up, which was very pleasing. We had, we had set out to reduce the length of time necessary to clean it up. We actually cleaned it up. Oh well, that's pretty neat. And actually, we've been really surprised at how effective this technology is. We're real excited that it's going to be used on other facilities, not only in the DoE's complex but, across the nation.

There are technologies that are broadly applicable to everyone's environmental cleanup needs. That's another. There are just, there are not gonna clean every site. They're appropriate for certain types of cleanup and now people can hire someone to go and apply these technologies and clean up their site.

CALLISON:Great. That sounded good to me. Are there any other environmental technologies that are being developed here? I mean you don't have to go into detail, but I mean just give me an idea of what your scope is.

NEWMARK: Sure. At the laboratory, we have expertise in a broad range of subjects including biology, chemistry, physics, earth sciences... and people with this expertise are devoting their talents to a broad range of problems. Environmental technology being one of them.

We have projects looking at environment, environmental biology issues, looking at thermal cleanup, looking at ways to implement or better engineer other peoples technology that have been developed elsewhere. And also applying them on our own cleanup si..., our own cleanup problems.

So, not only are we developing new technologies but, we feel its important that, to the extent that we can, we can help get other peoples technologies proven in the field, so they can be used elsewhere as well.

I think that one of the strengths of the laboratory is that because we have such a diverse range of expertise, we can, we can pull on those resources, to to develop something that's inter-disciplinary, demonstrate it and verify that it really works. And then it can be simplified for practical use.

You don't need a nuclear physicist or very fancy analytical equipment for every cleanup. Once you're really sure that this particular method really works. So, for our technology, we used quite a, a wide range of sophisticated diagnostics to verify that it really works in the ground. But, a commercial vendor wouldn't need all of that. It would be much less costly. Once you've proven the technology for for future implementation.

CALLISON: What percentages of the lab work here is non-military and what types of programs are they? I mean I, you kind of touched on that already.

NEWMARK: The laboratory addresses problems across the national need in many different ways. About 20% of the labs budget comes from non-defense sources. We work in the bio-medical field. We've had some really wonderful, wonderful successes in the environmental and the bio-medical field, that you wouldn't normally think of as defense-related. But the people were here because of defense problems initially, but they can also apply their talents and they are applying their talents in kind of a broad range of other ex, other topical areas.

We have a lot of work in energy, new transportation mechanisms, fuel cycles, things that are going to help us in the new millennium become more efficient. Which are really non-defense projects.

CALLISON: Is environmental technology production an area that Lawrence Livermore sees itself moving towards more in the future? I mean, it doesn't look that there's such a strong need for defense production. It just doesn't seem like there's a real Soviet threat anymore. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way I get it.

So it seems like labs might need to be turning their, their efforts toward another area and, you know, is environmental production an area that Livermore is looking at? Or am I completely off base?

NEWMARK: Let me, let me make two statements that might help. The labs role is not production. The labs role is technology development and proof. We're pretty expensive. You don't want to hire us to go clean up your site but, if we can develop a technology that really works, we develop the technology. We try to assure it's verification demonstration and then get it commercialized so someone can use it. That's really our role, as technology developer.

And so the, I think the question of whether the lab, the labs work is, is, should be in the military complex or not, that it doesn't seem, it's not that kind of a question.

The other statement I wanted to make was....The kind of work that the laboratory does has a national mission focus. We are a national security laboratory. But also, I'll try to explain how we can utilize that in things like the environmental sector.

People who worry about terrorist threats or how you diagnose chemicals coming out of a plant, the technologies that work on counter-terrorism are things that are developing new diagnostic methods that I can use in the environmental sector.

I have to worry about chemicals emanating out from underneath a factory. How can we characterize that site better? How can we be verify that we've really cleaned it up? Right now the normal analytical means are quite costly and cumbersome, but the other side of our house are doing analytical methods are always developing newer, better, lower detection limits, that I can now use on the environmental side.

So I don't think that that that our mission should go into environmental. We have a mission in environmental. What we really do well is to utilize the new things being developed across the board into the right sectors that can take advantage of them.

CALLISON: OK. Some critics have said that while Lawrence Livermore seems to be focusing in other areas that they're still a nuclear weapons laboratory and that ones should not, kind of, gloss over that fact. What is your response to people when they, or what would your response be to that?

NEWMARK:The lab was founded because of nuclear weapons and the nuclear threat has not gone away. The laboratory is a national security... The laboratory has, the laboratory has a national security mission.

CALLISON: Do you want to back up?

NEWMARK: Yeah. The laboratory was founded to develop nuclear weapons and that's why our expert, where our expertise came from. We have a national security mission. And that's not going to go away. The, the the nature of the threats change as time goes on, but there are still threats out there. People here work very hard to address the threats, to the extent that we're not looking at a, the same kind of conventional war that you might have thought of two decades ago. Doesn't mean that war doesn't exist.

So, the people here work very hard to address whatever national security issues are pertinent. My job is to help bridge, utilize the technologies being developed through the national security mission and see what can be applied in the environmental sector or in the energy sector and take advantage of the new methods being developed here for one purpose and use them for another.

CALLISON: OK. Are you happy with that? I only ask because you seemed to get a little confused there in the middle.

NEWMARK: It's the..there are things that I say that I do but would be, you know there's me as a person in the laboratory and then there's me as a representative of my directorate. I have many jobs. I say, in this scenario I'm in one job, that's why I'm kind of.....did, is that an OK thing. Yeah OK.

CALLISON: Yeah, the last ones about jobs. The last question I had was about jobs. Military development has created many good jobs. Do you see this environmental technology as an area that could help, could either replace military production as a job creator or help, you know, supplement or will it have any effect at all?

NEWMARK: That's a hard...You're....It's a whole different context. Let me give, let me, let me give this a shot.

CALLISON: Well, I mean, like if you're looking at Dynamic Underground Stripping as an example, I mean, from my understanding, Craig Eaker in his group, is a contractor. Is that correct? That they're not really with Lawrence Livermore, but they're using their licencing? OK. Now would you think that this technology has helped them with their jobs and it maybe helped them hire new people in their cleanup area? I mean, that's kind of what I'm looking at.

NEWMARK: I think that the new technologies that we're developing are making an impact in the private sector. People are licensing our technologies, are able to go and provide this new service in the community.

We've done it in the environmental sector. We have things like the Parragon Project, which is... The Parragon Project is a really cool example because it's a way to reduce the amount of radiation dust when you're doing lemography. And we know a lot about radiation, we know a lot about signal processing and doses. And we know how to write code, so we've managed to package something and give it to the bio-medical community and they're using it. I don't know if we've created new jobs, but we've certainly improved the, the technologies available in those sectors.

People move with the jobs so I think that, that maybe that's helped.

Another way of looking at it is looking at a lot of the military people or the civilians employed by the military at bases that are being closed. Are military structures reducing in size? And a lot of these people have had to find new jobs. Many of them have gotten involved in the environmental cleanup business because they've had to clean up the military bases that were being closed.

My group works very closely with a group in the Navy who are taking our technologies, not only developed for thermal cleanup and and enhanced cleanup, but also for unexploded ordinance detection and other mechanisms for making the bases fit or transfer to private, um, private holdings...

With Dynamic Underground Stripping, not only can you remove contamination very rapidly, we're also getting the point where you can even talk about closing a site in the matter of a few years, rather than centuries.

The, the demonstration of the Livermore Gas Pad, which we'll go and look at.. This was an old gasoline station. It looks just like any other Mom n' Pop gasoline station and fuel had leaked into the sub-surface and then got to the water table and kind of spread out. What we did was, we rounded it up and herded it to the center and removed it. The traditional pump and treat was going to take in the order of two-hundred years. We went in and operated in a period of twenty-one weeks, scattered across about one year and the site was closed two years later. So, that kind of rapid aggressive recovery and cessation of cleanup is really exciting.

At Visalia, they were looking at pumping and treating until the cows come home, as we call it. They had been at it for about twenty years, they were towards the end of...They had been at it about twenty years. They were getting about ten pounds out a week. In the first six weeks of Dynamic Underground Stripping operations, we had removed three-hundred thousand pounds. We've been out about twenty-nine months, a little over two years, gotten out over a million pounds of product. That correlates to about two, oh wait, about one hundred and twenty, let me see, I'll have to check that.

They thought they had maybe forty to eighty housand gallons of creosote in the sub-surface there. And we've already removed more than that. We're cleaner that clean but, truthfully it's very hard to characterize and know exactly how much is there. The fact that we've recovered so much, so rapidly is very satisfying to a site owner. We're now looking at closing the site in a few years, rather than being at it for hundreds of years.